David Reveman has made the latest XGL source code available to download. This comes a few weeks after development of the project was criticised for being done 'behind closed doors'. There have been huge changes to XGL, the most significant being restructuring of the code, allowing XGL's GLX support to function on other drivers than the proprietary Nvidia one. Xcompmgr can currently be run under XGL with full acceleration provided that the proprietary ATI or Nvidia drivers are used. An OpenGL based compositing manager, 'Compiz' is currently in the works and a release is expected in February. David intends to get the code into freedesktop CVS as soon as possible, after which the code should eventually merge with Xorg.

If the price of OGL graphic underpinnings is going closed source for the drivers, we might as well go Apple or Micosoft, because the core principal of FOSS is lost on a dependant, mixed system.

I don't think we have the right to be making that decision for everyone. Each person should be free to choose what they are comfortable with. For example I have no problem with running binary NVidia drivers while you may have a problem with it. In that case, you shouldn't buy an Nvidia card and instead buy an ATI 9XXXX series which has a free driver available.

If you stick with "open source or die" and ATI/Nvidia never opens their hardware then we might as well forget about Linux on the desktop. Within the next three or four years having an accelerated GUI is going to become a requirement and not an option on desktops. What are you going to do if no hardware on the market in that timeframe has open drivers available?

That is my fear, by the time the community figures out that accelerating the GUI is a requirement, not an option, we will have five years of catch up programming to do and no one will undertake such a large task. At that point Linux on the desktop is a lost cause.

Obviously we will keep pursuing free drivers where ever possible. I lean on ATI/Nvidia to release specs every chance I get. But it's their hardware and they don't have to release specs if they don't want to.

However, I don't agree with the logic that says, since there are no free high level drivers available then X should not expose high level features. That's option #1, continue with the status quo. In the long run that strategy can become a complete disaster if all future video hardware goes with closed source drivers. At some future point there may be no more open hardware available.